Search form

You are here

Joellen Anderson ’11

How far will Joellen Anderson go to find forever homes for 10 stray dogs? 8,000 miles by air—and another 1,600 miles by land. Here’s the incredible tale of the Canine Caravan.

Under gray Los Angeles skies on a December day, a Qatar Airways jet from Delhi, India, touched down at LAX after a 16-hour flight. Among those on board were 10 passengers of the four-legged variety, ages 4 months to 2 years, and their two-legged chaperone. “When you are a girl and you’re alone and you have 10 dogs, people take pity on you,” says Joellen Anderson ’11. “Almost everyone loves dogs.”

Even so, finding forever homes for the strays that find their way to Peepal Farm—the animal recovery center and organic farm near Dharamsala, India, that she and cofounder Robin Singh established in 2014—is a constant challenge. While the shelter treats a multitude of animals—including dogs, cows, cats, pigs, lamb, goats, and the occasional monkey—“There’s really no outflow,” Anderson says. “There are very few people locally who will adopt a stray dog.”

Thanks to the global reach of social media, Peepal Farm has enjoyed some success in placing dogs farther afield, including England, Finland, Germany, Israel, and Scotland. And only a few months ago, with the help of a dog lover in Vancouver, British Columbia, Anderson hatched her most ambitious plan.

“I had this crazy idea since we get a lot of interest from people in adopting in the U.S. and Canada—why don’t we just take the dogs there?” she explained in a YouTube video. With Anderson leading the way, the “Canine Caravan” would transport nine dogs from Dharamsala down to Delhi, put them on a flight to Los Angeles, and deliver them to forever homes in Seattle and Vancouver. Total distance: more than 9,600 miles. “I might be out of my mind,” she admits in the video, which raised nearly $4,700 to help underwrite the trip. “But this should be fun.”

Anderson has been working with dogs since she was 15, beginning with the local Humane Society in her hometown of Tucson. She picked up spending money as a dog walker at Occidental and majored in urban and environmental policy.

After graduation, Anderson spent close to eight months traveling the world, including northern Africa and Europe. Along the way she met Singh, who was planning a trip to Auroville, in the south of India, to help a woman who was running a shelter for abandoned dogs. “I kind of invited myself on the trip,” Anderson says.

The duo would spend several months in Auroville cleaning up the shelter and putting systems in place. Their work planted the seeds for Peepal Farm, located in the Himalayan foothills less than an hour from the home of the Dalai Lama.

The farm has given sanctuary to scores of strays, including cows. “Despite India having the reputation of holy cows, the way they are treated is really bad,” she notes. Once their milk production declines, “Most cows are abandoned, since slaughter is illegal in our state, or they’re hit by trucks and left to die.”

While Peepal Farm has managed to facilitate both a cow and a bull adoption nearby, the bulk of its energies on Facebook and Instagram go into profiling the dogs who come there in need of healing. “When people read the stories of these dogs, and the situations they’ve been trapped in, they connect with an individual dog and they want to adopt them,” Anderson says.